Course for Young Doctors

Young Doctors Course: Lecture VI

LECTURE VI

Dornach, January 7, 1924

For reasons I will not now mention, I will
postpone the more esoteric lecture I had intended to give
today, to the end of this course, and speak to you now about
something else.

A certain
amount of astonishment may have been caused when it was said
yesterday that if we want to get at the realities, we must
think, for instance, of thought being behind solid, earthy
phenomena, and courage behind all that is of the nature of
air. There is a significance from the point of view of
medical history in having our attention drawn to the fact
that thought is to be connected with all that is solid,
earthy, all that stands before us with definite contours. For
this leads us to say to ourselves that thought —
thought as a force — is not to be connected with the
watery, with the circulation of fluids in the human organism.
Neither is thought to be connected with the airy and the
warmth nature in man. We have spoken of the conception we
must have of the air and the warmth in the cosmos. Within the
human being, too, all these things are present, but in a
particular form. Within the human being it is like this
— only that which has contours, including that which,
although it may be soft and pliable, has, nevertheless, the
character of solidity, only this may be thought of as
corresponding to thought. We have said that behind the fluid,
or the watery element which confronts us in the physical
world, we have to think of something spiritual —
namely, something that is of the nature of feeling.

This element
of feeling within the human organism must be thought of in a
special way. We usually think of subjective feeling in this
connection; we think of feeling that is connected with the
psychical and bodily constitution of the human being. But
within the human being, feeling is not merely this direct
experience; feeling has an up-building activity within the
human being. The watery or fluid body, as a formation of the
universal, cosmic fluidity, contains feeling as its very
essence. This etheric activity that works within the fluid
body must be understood, but it cannot be understood by the
same kind of knowledge that we apply to something that is
outside the human being, because the substances and processes
within the human organism do not work in the same way as they
do in the external environment. The moment we come to the
fluid organism — when we have to do with a part of the
human organization which is in fluid circulation, although
there are vascular organs within it — in that moment
the knowledge forces which can be applied to what is outside
the human being in the physical world are no longer
adequate.

That is why
medicine lost its knowledge of the fluid man—that was
the last of the higher members of which knowledge was lost.
One may say that up to the middle forties of the nineteenth
century, medicine still had an inkling of the existence of
this fluid man. People spoke of the humors, of the
circulation of the fluids, of the mixture and the separation
of the fluids. Medicine was not confined to the physiology
and pathology of cells but actually perceived the
combinations and separation of fluids. In the nineteenth
century, of course, it was all tradition, but this tradition
led back to the time before the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, when men had not only tradition but also actual
knowledge — knowledge in the form in which we today
wrestle for in Anthroposophy and should be able to reach in
imagination. Knowledge in those days had, it is true, an
illusionary character, but men had instinctive imaginations.
It was known that the human organism cannot be understood by
mere sense perception and cogitation; it was known that
thinking and sense observation could only be applied to those
parts of the organism which have firm contours, and that
knowledge of the circulation of the fluids in the watery man
must be gained through imagination. It is, therefore, not to
be wondered at that the perception of this fluid man was
lost. Perception of the fluid man can only come again when we
attain to imaginations in full consciousness.

Let us go
over what has been said, once again. When the bony system is
building itself up from out of the human organism taken as a
totality, when the human being is, as it were, crystallizing
into the skeleton — this is not a good way of
expressing it, but you will understand what I mean —
cosmic thoughts are weaving in him. The organs that have
definite outlines have these outlines only because they are
subject to the same forces to which the building of the bones
is subject. It is only the bony structure in the physical
sense that is of the nature of thought, and the other organs
with definite outlines have been built up out of the etheric
world by an activity of thought. Inasmuch as they have
definite outlines and contours, an activity of the nature of
thought has been working. The forms in the human organism of
which physiology and pathology speak are the result of an
activity that is of the nature of thought.

But this is
only one member of the human organization, and it must fall
out of the human organization if one does not rise to
imagination. It is imagination that can lead us to the fluid
man, to the way in which the muscles are formed out of the
fluidity and how the being of man pours into the muscles.
Muscles appear to be solid, but this is mere semblance.

Imagination
is indispensable if one wants to comprehend the uniting of
the solid nature of the bony structure with the fluid nature
of the blood into what has the semblance of another solid
structure — muscle.

We must
therefore realize: Thought, which is of course, supported by
physical perception, can in reality, only grasp the bony
system, and apart from the bony system everything else that
thought may say about the human being is fantasy.

We must
ascend from thinking to imagination. With imagination we can
grasp the nature of the fluid man and understand how this
fluid man shoots into the muscular system. The fundamental
nature of the muscles can only be grasped by imagination. Why
is this? You see, if you apply thoughts, you cannot help
applying, too, those laws which are discovered by thought,
namely, mechanical laws. You apply the laws of statics and
dynamics, and this is possible with the bony system. But just
try to apply statics and dynamics to the muscular system and
see how you get on! Try to calculate from the laws of statics
how you can crush a cherry pit, or a peach pit, by biting it.
Try to find out by an experiment how much weight of pressure
is necessary to crush this cherry stone. Some — not all
of us perhaps — try to bite them! But try to reckon out
whether, according to the laws of mechanics, a muscle is
capable of crushing a cherry pit. Thought alone will never
help you to understand the muscular system. It is quite
impossible. The moment we come to the muscles, the principles
of mechanics become futile. We must be able to pass over to a
form of knowledge that can leave the laws of mechanics behind
and which grasps the whole picture of the muscles through
imagination. Ordinary gravity is non-existent here. For the
moment you come to the watery element you have to do with
pure buoyancy.

In the things
that you do with your etheric body, you have nothing to do
with weight but with what overcomes weight to a great extent.
Even this will make you realize that quite a different form
of knowledge must be applied to the muscular system. This
form of knowledge is imagination. The muscular system is
comprehended through imagination — though there are
transitions everywhere. It is not possible to understand the
muscular system unless we conceive of it as a structure that
has not arisen in the same way as the bony system. It has
taken shape, as it were, through a coagulation of blood. This
is just as inadequate an expression as when I say that the
bony system crystallizes, but it is a comparatively correct
picture. Suppose you take some bone — the radius or the
ulna, or upper arm — and apply the laws of leverage to
it. This is quite all right. But while you can understand by
the laws of leverage and other laws of mechanics what goes on
in the radius or upper arm, just think whether these laws
help you to understand what is going on in a muscle. Your
mental pictures here must all become mobile, must be
transformed. The essential characteristic of imagination is
that it can always yield and give way and so embrace the
substance of things that have their being in the process of
metamorphosis. And this is the characteristic of the muscle;
the muscle has its life in its metamorphosis. In contrast to
the bones to which the laws of mechanics can be applied, the
muscle is just as mobile as the pictures of metamorphosis
— say pictures, not thoughts — which we have in
imagination.

In the
bony system we have the solid, earthy man; in the muscular
system we have the fluid man, the watery man.

At the stage
of inspiration, above imagination, we come to the airy man,
to what is aeriform within the human being. In inspiration we
approach a mode of cognition that very much resembles the
hearing of musical tones, melodies. Inspiration has nothing
any longer to do with concepts but with something that is
like the cognition, the realization of music. Music must not
always be heard; inasmuch as it is spiritual, it can also be
felt, experienced. All inspiration has, fundamentally,
something musical about it. It is a strange fact that the
form of the inner organs of man, of those organs which really
provide for the growing organization during life in
nourishment, breathing, etc., that none of these organ forms
can be explained by any laws of mechanics. Not even by
imaginative knowledge are they to be explained. It is just
nonsense to try to explain the form of the lungs, of the
liver, through their position, through the lie of the cells
or through weight. Just try to discover if anyone has
succeeded in explaining the form of the liver or the lung and
you will find that there is nobody. For these organs, which
look after the life that is coming into being during earthly
life, are present, in germ, at a very early stage, although
later on they are much metamorphosed. They are all of them
the outcome of the formative forces of the air.

Modern
science says: Air is composed of oxygen, nitrogen and a few
other substances. The aeriform substance is more or less
uniform, only differentiated through inner mechanical
movement, such as can be observed in wind. But the air that
is described by physics today does not exist, in reality. The
air that surrounds our earth is permeated throughout with
formative forces. We breathe in these formative forces
together with the physical substantiality of the air. Once
our organs are complete and we breathe in the air, these
formative forces coincide, as it were, with the form of the
lung and are not particularly significant except for the
purposes of growth. But during the embryonic period, while
there is a physical isolation from the external air —
then these formative forces of the air work by way of the
body of the mother. They build up the lungs and the other
organs, with the exception of the muscles and bones. All the
inner organs that are to receive life are built up out of the
formative forces of the air.

What happens
here can be compared — although the comparison is a
crude one — to the Chladnic sound figures. Plates
covered with fine dust are secured at some point, a violin
bow is drawn across the edge of the plate, and then the dust
forms itself into certain patterns according to how the
violin bow is drawn across the plate. The figures in the dust
are formed out of the formative forces produced in the air.
So too, the inner organs of man are formed out of the
universal formative forces of the air. The lung is formed out
of the breathing forces, also the other organs, only the
other organs are formed more or less indirectly, the lungs
directly. This fact, that the organs are built out of the
formative forces of the air, is only to be grasped through
inspiration. What has been built out of the air, formed out
of the air, has something of the nature of music about it,
just as the musical element is at the basis of the Chladnic
sound figures.

Much of what
modern physiology says is so fundamentally false that one
sometimes is embarrassed to say what is correct, so greatly
does it differ from what is stated in the ordinary way. In
acts of hearing, all the organs of the human being, not only
the inner organs of hearing, vibrate together with the air.
The whole man vibrates, if only slightly; and the ear is not
the organ of hearing just because it vibrates but because it
brings to consciousness what is present in the rest of the
organism. There is a great but also a subtle, delicate
distinction in saying that man hears through the ear, or
through the ear is brought to consciousness what has been
heard. The human being is built out of sound, although not
from sound that is actually heard. Inspiration is required
for comprehension of the inner organs. The organization of
man's inner organs, of the aeriform man, must be understood
by means of inspiration. It is really not to be wondered at
that real understanding of the inner organs of man was
already lost in days of antiquity, for inspiration was lost
and inspiration is the only means whereby the inner organs
can be understood. They can be taken from the corpse and
diagrams can be made of them, but they cannot be understood
by this means.

You see,
therefore, that the whole human organism stands really
towards the background of the physical world. After reading
my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, people
always get the picture: Here is the physical world and behind
it, the spiritual world, in stages or degrees. We reach the
nearest spiritual world through imagination, a further
spiritual world through inspiration and a further world
through intuition. But people do not picture to themselves
that of all that is within the human being, the bony system
alone is built up by the elementary spirits, whereas the
muscular system is built up by spiritual beings of a higher
hierarchy. This must be known and understood. A man must be
able to reach these beings through imagination if he is to
understand the muscles.

To understand
the inner organs, still higher spiritual beings must be
reached through inspiration. The inner structure of a
skeleton, too, can only be truly understood with inspiration.
Just think of the following. A modern scientist investigates
a plant by analyzing its substance by the methods current
today. But this is by no means the plant in its reality. The
plant is built up from out of the cosmos, as I said
yesterday. It is only the root that is built up from earthly
forces. The whole form of the plant is a spiritual reality, a
super-sensible reality; this super-sensible reality is then
filled with matter. And a man who merely examines this
physical matter in the plant is like someone who has a
document in front of him that is wet with ink, that he has
covered with sand to dry and who then imagines that the sand
is the essential thing of the document. The document is
covered with this sand and then it is scratched away and the
man says: I am examining the sand and I read what the
document contains out of the sand. This, more or less, is the
way in which people explain the root of a plant, whereas in
reality the root is spiritual, filled with physical substance
in its framework. So too, the human organs merely receive
physical substance.

The
reality is that only the bony system is physical; the muscles
are etheric, the organs are astral.

If we can
attain true intuition we get to the warmth man, the
organization that is a space of warmth, inwardly
differentiated. The human being actually experiences himself
in warmth; his relationship to warmth is not the same as to
carbon or nitrogen. Warmth is within him and the human being
is within it when he experiences warmth.

The
experience of warmth is intense and real and a modern man
cannot deny that he has it, whereas he has no inkling of the
fact that he experiences air, water, earth. He has no inkling
of this because he has grown out of these experiences.
Understanding of the warmth involves the application of
intuition to the human organization, but it is the delicate
differentiations of the warmth in the forms of the organs
themselves which have to be perceived and experienced. When
intuition can be applied to the warmth organism through the
whole body, this form of cognition leads, not, in this case,
to an understanding of the inner organs as such, but to the
activity of these inner organs. The activity of the inner
organs must be grasped by an understanding of the
organization within the warmth ether. Every other kind of
knowledge is incapable of bringing about understanding of the
activity of the organs. The activity of the warmth ether, of
the warmth man, must be cognized by intuition.

It will not
do simply to think: There is the physical world and one must
acquire imagination, inspiration and intuition in order to
attain the other worlds. The other worlds are actually
present; the etheric world is present in the muscular system,
the astral world in the organs and the devachanic world, the
spirit world, is present in the warmth man. The spiritual is
always around us; it is actually present. Man is a spirit and
this spirit is merely filled with physical substance. To say
that man is a physical being is an illusion; man in himself
is a spirit who actually reaches up into the higher world
through his warmth organization.

That is why
it is so odd that spiritualists should sit around a table and
address themselves to spirits who are far, far inferior to
those eight or ten people who are sitting around the table
without knowing that they are spirits! This is a truth that
must be taken very, very deeply to heart, and then progress
can be made.

If through
initiation we have grasped the nature of this wonderful
activity from organ to organ which goes on in the warmth
ether, we find that there are two kinds of warmth. The warmth
ether is a quite special element. When any process calls
forth a change in the warmth ether, there is always a
counter-working. There is always action and reaction with
streamings of warmth. The warmth ether is differentiated
within itself. There is always a coarser etheric substance
which runs counter to a more delicate one.

Suppose you
are in a room that is comfortably warm. You make it warmer
— so warm that you cannot stand it. That is not merely
a physical condition but also a condition of the life of
soul. The more delicate warmth is experienced by the soul.
The experience of warmth is really always twofold; there is
the warmth that we experience psychically and the warmth in
which we live, the warmth that is outside the soul; there is
the warmth that is within our warmth organism and the warmth
that is external to us. Warmth is of the nature of the soul.
We can therefore speak of a physical warmth and a soul
warmth.

If we pass on
to the inner organs, to the aeriform man, where inspiration
is needed, here we have the airy element in its main form.
Whereas the finer warmth works within warmth, in the aeriform
there works light. Intuition reveals warmth within warmth;
warmth remains warmth when it is differentiating itself
within itself. But this is not the case with air. The real
air is not the fantastic air of the physicists which
surrounds our earth like another skin. The real air is
inconceivable without some condition of light — for
darkness is also a condition of light. Light and air belong
together; light is an active, organizing force in the whole
airy organism. Here we come still further into the realm of
soul. There is not only external light but also metamorphosed
inner light which permeates the whole human being, which
lives in him. The light lives within him together with the
air.

Equally, the
chemical forces (chemism) are within the human being,
together with the water, with the fluid element. Water
conceived as physical water, the water of the physicists, is
pure fantasy. To picture the fluid element within the human
being without the chemical forces is just like picturing a
human organism without a head. It can be drawn without a head
and the life of soul can be entirely eliminated, but then
there is no longer any reality. If you cut the head away from
your body, the body cannot live, it is no longer an organism.
In the same way, the fluid nature in man is not what the
physicists fantastically describe as water. Just as the
organism, with the head, forms one whole, so is the fluid
organism bound up with the chemical forces. The solid or
earthy in the human organism only exists in statu
nascendi. Like the water in the human being, it is
immediately transformed. Within the human being the earthy is
bound up with life.

Earth

Life

Water

Chemical Forces

Air

Light

Warmth

Warmth

Physical Body

Etheric Body

The physical
body and its corresponding etheric body form one whole; they
are one unit, seen from two sides. We have the ether stages:
warmth, light, chemical forces, life — and we have the
physical stages: warmth, air, water, earth. When we give an
abstract description of the ethers we give the first place to
the warmth ether; when we start from the fluid or solid as
the lowest ether, then the highest ether is the life ether.
But when we describe the human being we say that the warmth
man, the inner activity of the organs, is known by means of
intuition. As we descend to the coarsest stage, from the
warmth to the earthy in the physical organism, we ascend, in
the etheric body, from warmth into life. What does this mean?
Think of it. It means that the human being really reverses
his own attributes, or qualities. He expends the warmth ether
only upon the warmth organism, the light ether upon the airy
organism, the chemical ether upon the fluid organism, the
life ether upon his solid organization. If you really grasp
this, then you cannot think as people ordinarily think. If
you insist upon thinking along the ordinary lines, you can,
in reality, grasp only the bony system, the earthy human
being. It is necessary for you to pass over from ordinary
thinking to an inner comprehension of the world, as I have
said before.

The fact that
medical science has a certain peculiarity is connected with
these things. Medical knowledge was an outstanding part of
the ancient mysteries where man had real insight into the
treatment of a sick human being. The physicians were trained
in the mysteries — they were not merely medical men,
but they were also sages, wise men who looked after the
religious cults. It is natural that the physician should have
kept his knowledge secret, as was the case with all mystery
knowledge. For you see, if a man wants to know something, he
must clothe this knowledge in thoughts; otherwise he floats
about in indefiniteness. The picture that comes in
imagination, what is heard spiritually (inspiration) and also
what is beheld in intuition must all be clothed in thoughts.
In ancient times it was known that medical knowledge must be
clothed in thoughts. But by clothing it in thoughts it is
deprived of some of its efficacy. I am touching here upon
deep matters. It cannot be denied that the knowledge of
remedies in a sense takes away their power and a really
serious physician must deny himself the use of these
therapeutic measures which he uses for his patients; he must
deny himself and use, for himself, other kinds of healing.
Please think about this last sentence and you will realize,
in a much deeper sense than before, that the physician must
personally cultivate the mood of helping. He must deny
himself the healing forces which he applies to his patients.
If a man ascribes the efficacy of a remedy merely to the
chemical forces, if he imagines that remedies work like steam
in a locomotive, he is not submitting to these spiritual
laws. But the moment it is realized that the human being
reaches up into the spiritual, it will never be doubted that
spiritual laws are at the basis of what is contained in the
different remedies. In its real essence, medicine is the most
wonderful means of education towards selflessness. To demand
that therapy should be taught as mechanics or similar
subjects are taught is a crude and coarse misunderstanding.
The laws of mechanics can, of course, be applied to the human
being, but that is valid then to humanity as a whole. And the
physician's work is entirely individual. If a physician has a
really profound knowledge of some remedy, it is necessary for
him, to a certain extent, to deny healing himself by means of
this remedy. This is the great education towards
selflessness. I will indicate sometime how the physician can
help himself. But you must understand in your hearts what
underlies these facts. If you take seriously and earnestly
what I have said, it will become a world necessity to
introduce into medicine not egoism but altruism. Altruism,
selflessness, is the basic principle of medicine. Medical
morality is not something that has been invented but proceeds
from heavenly laws, from laws which the cosmos itself has
formed in order to create remedies which follow its own
laws.

The more
earnestly a communication like this is taken, the more it
will be able to contribute to an understanding of the real
basis of all remedies.